Photo: children in a north Bosnian camp, 2000, relishing their dignity.

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The ovens at Dachau were last used to dispose of the bodies of executed Nazi leaders condemned at Nuremburg.New organisations and groupings sprang up in response: the UN, the EU, Nato and more.But all are as nothing if there is no will to act.

One recent example demonstrates the feebleness of human rights legislation when diplomats hold sway.As war was unleashed on a progressive European people a one hour flight from London, human rights legislation and the United Nations proved useless without the political resolve of the West.

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Outside the Neretva Hotel in Mostar,Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1992.

The pistol is not a toy.The city witnessed some of the most bitter fighting during the war in former Yugoslavia.At first Serb irregulars and the Bosnian Serb Army shelled and occupied parts of the city, looting and destroying.Later, when the uneasy pact between Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats fell apart, the place became the stage for a bizarre dance with death.Whilst excrement, ruins and graveyards littered the remains of the Bosniaks’ beleaguered east bank enclave, an SAS team worked in the shadow of the guns, directly for the UN commander, General Rose.

‘We rounded a corner and blinked.Stretching away in front of us was the continuation of the same street we’d just trundled down.Where there’d been filth and rubble on the Muslim side, here we saw bright shop windows and cafes and pavements.

The buildings were hardly scratched.

‘What the f***…?’ Keith said.‘Did we just breeze into an episode of Time Tunnel or something?’

I knew what he meant.Not only did it seem like a different era, it felt like we’d been plonked down in a different city.I hadn't seen so many neon lights and posers since the Via del Corso in Rome.

This, I realised, was a bottled version of the Muslim-Croat divide across the whole of Bosnia.While the Muslims suffered, the ethnic Croats just got on with it, their needs met by their big brother in Croatia proper.You couldn’t help but wonder how the Muslims had held out for so long.’

‘After six centuries we are again engaged in battles and quarrels. They are notarmed battles, but this cannot be excluded yet.’

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Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic (1941-2006), 600thanniversary speechto more than a million people at the Mediaeval battlefield of Kosovo Polje, ‘The Field of Blackbirds’, where a defeat by the Turks prompted the Serb exodus from their ancestralhomeland. 28 June, 1989.He was elected president that year.

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‘Genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon in harmony with the societal and mythologically Divine nature. Genocide is not only permitted it is also recommended, even commanded by the Word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the earthly

kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith.’

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His opposite number, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman (1922-1999),

Wastelands of Historical Truth, 1987

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‘I think it would be a good idea.’

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Quote attributed to Gandhi on being asked his view of Western civilisation.Religious leaders too were quick to fan the flames of war.

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‘The West is not aware of the penetration of Islam in the Balkans, where mosques are rising where there were none before.’

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Serbian Orthodox Bishop Atansije,

speaking of Hercegovina in 1992

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In 1992 a Bosnian Serb artillery shell penetrated the minaret of this ancient Hercegovinan mosque (right:)

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‘There was (to be) no cavalry coming over the hill.There is no international force coming to stop this.’

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Sunday Telegraph 16/8/1992

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Douglas Hogg MP, of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, describes to journalists at Sarajevo airport how he explained to Bosnia’s President Izetbegovic the realities of the situation as seen from the British government’s perspective.

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Colonel Norrie Phillips, commander of over 1,400 fighters in Mostar, is a former 22 Special Air Service staff sergeant.Employed by the Bosnian Croats as a trainer of potential officers, he later fought with the Bosniaks until the end of the war against his former protégés when their betrayal became apparent at a commander's planning meeting in Medjugorge.Outside Listica, Bosnia Hercegovina, 1992

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‘I don’t give a f**k.These people are

paying your wages.’

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Ian Greer on the Serbian government, 1992.President Milosevic paid British political lobbyists Ian Greer Associates nearly £100,000 to use his stable of tame ‘Cash for Questions’MPs to promote Serbian interests in Parliament.

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‘I learned to treat Britain as a hostile power, out to block anything, everything.They were prepared to go to the wall against us on Bosnia.I came to think of the British as like having the Russians around the State

Department.Or maybe the Serbs themselves.’

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US State Department senior official

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A hospital in Mostar, 1992.This doctor explains why her patients had to be moved into the relative safety of the basements; the building was situated next to an army headquarters and was coming under repeated artillery fire from the Bosnian Serb Army.The room she is standing in was an operating theatre which received a direct hit just minutes after an operation.The outer wall was a ragged hole.

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‘Let us do nothing - AT ONCE!’

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Mathew Gordon, former United Nations chief press officer, on a previous conflict.

He was translating a representative’s speech for the English-speaking press corps.

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‘If these governments are not moved by those pictures of death and suffering if they are not moved by the position of ethnic cleansing in Europe, two million refugees, mass graves being found in Croatia, then they should be; we cannot let things go on like this. It is evil.’

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Lady Thatcher rounds on EC leaders, including then-Prime Minister John Major, during an interview with the American NBC News channel, April 15, 1993.

A day later the UN voted to make Srebrenica a ‘safe haven’.Two years later,over 8,000 civilians, including children, were massacred there as Dutch UN soldiers, commanded by the craven Colonel Thomas Karremans,looked on.During that day, the colonel was filmed raising a glass with General Ratko Mladic, shaking his hand and smiling.He was promoted to full colonel shortly after his return to the Netherlands.

‘There are people around here (Beverly Hills) who havehave armed response teams hooked up to their alarm systems.Press a button and Rambo arrives.It’s bad news if you forgot your door keys.Others fill their swimming pool with mineral water and bring in bottled mountain air from the Rockies.My dad would have loved this place; no idea is too silly.’

Right: ‘press a button and Rambo arrives’.An armed Australian mercenary arrives in Split, ready to fight..

‘Beginning in April, Serb forces attacked Muslims and Croats living in towns, villages, and smaller settlements, most of which were undefended and contained no military targets. Muslims and Croats were mistreated and killed. Men were often arrested and taken to detention centres, while women and children were forced to leave their homes, and were either detained or forced to leave the municipality…

Many detainees were also deliberately killed, by members of paramilitaries, police or other Serb forces.’

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Extract from the Summary of Judgement against Momcilo Krajishnik, highest ranking politician at the International Criminal Tribunalfor the former Yugoslavia.

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‘Asked why the prisoners were so thin, (police chief) Mr. Drljaca said the Muslims were naturally skinny because they did not eat pork and fasted each year during Ramadan. ‘That's the way the Muslim nation is,’ he said. ‘Have you read the Koran?’’

(After driving from the Omarska camp to the Manjacha processing camp):

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‘The eerie silence lasted around ten minutes.‘You got a Dedo Crnalich on this bus?’ came the first call in the bus right next to Djemo.Now they were after Dedo, a guy everyone in Prijedor knew, the owner of one of the nicest restaurants in town, an athlete, and someone always involved in one public office or another.As he was getting out, one of the beasts said, ‘Now let me show you how hamburger meat should be ground up,’ and drew a sharp knife across Dedo’s back, right at the door of the bus.Blood spattered all over everyone crumpled up on top of each other by the door.They could hear Dedo’s blood gurgling and his breath expiring as his body wentinto convulsions; then the deathly silence returned.’

During a siege in Gorazde, the SAS team commander on the ground told forward headquarters at Gornji Vakuf of the dire situation the town was in.

‘The pocket has gone, James.It might not fold tonight, and it might not fold tomorrow.But the pocket has fallen, mate, believe me.The Serbs will be here any –’

‘Wait a minute!Hold it!’An unfamiliar voice had burst through on the radio… I recognised the voice now.It belonged to a Major, a member of the (SAS) Regiment on (General) Rose’s staff in Sarajevo.Just as we were monitoring the transmissions in and out of the pocket, so of course, was UNPROFOR’s forward headquarters.This Major, I remembered now, was a liaison officer, an LO on the general’s staff.

‘Charlie, this is Richard at headquarters.Watch your choice of words man.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ Charlie said.

Despite the frailty of the signal you could hear the mixture of astonishment and indignation in his voice.

‘I’m saying that you should think before you speak.This isn’t just a military situation that we have on our hands here.The whole thing is highly politically charged.Gorazde has not fallen, it will not fall.’’

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Cameron Spence, All Necessary Measures

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‘And if, to be sure, sometimes you have to conceal a fact with words, do it in such a way that it does not become known, or, if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defence.’

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Florentine diplomat and political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527, Advice to Raffaello Girolami when he went as Ambassador to the Emperor (October 1522)

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‘Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.’

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His Florentine contemporary Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

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‘According to Marco Altherr, former head of the International Committee for the Red Cross in Yugoslavia, the conflict there was ‘the firsttime I’ve seen such strong and effectivepropaganda on both sides. When you’re talking to either side, they’re absolutely convinced they’ll be slaughtered by the other side.’’

‘Everything has changed for us.But the real difference is that theshelling could start at any moment.When your main reason for being alive is luck, life becomes very strange.I don’t think people who have not been in that situation canunderstand it.It’s not so much a question of whether we survive, it is a question of staying normal.

After all the refugees, the dead bodies and the destruction, all those terrible things, the question is this: tomorrow, when all this is stopped, how will I live without remembering?Will I have a smile as before?Will I be happy as before?That is the question for all of us to answer, but I don’t know the answer.’

‘If that were so, the troops should have been kept out of harm’s way on Salisbury Plain preparing for a war they would never have to fight since to do so would have compromised their precious safety.This attitude was not only craven and cowardly – it was contemptuous of the armed forces themselves.’

‘At the height of the Bosnian crisis, in May 1993, Poland’s first post-Soviet president, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, at the time serving as a UN rapporteur on human rights, blasted the British government for opposing military intervention. ‘Any time there was a likelihood of effective action, a particular western statesman (British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd) intervened to prevent it.’’

Sir Rifkind’s nose also caught the whiff of lucre once the war wasover.The International High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lord ‘Paddy’ Ashdown, had to put Rifkind in his place in 2003: ‘There were… meetings with… ex-British Tory Minister of Defence Malcolm Rifkind who came to Bosnia representing a private British consultancy firm bidding for business on Bosnian privatisation projects.I had to explain to him that I was not a British official, charged with helping British business, but an international civil servant who could have no part in this process.’

Ayear later, in 1996, ‘a freshlyretired Douglas Hurd, now acting as deputy chairman of NatWest Markets, visited Milosovic in Belgrade in pursuit of a lucrative contract to advise on the privatisation of Serbian utilities.’

‘Appeasement was a term of praise between the two world wars of the twentieth century; it is a term of abuse today.But the peacemakers have their ration of praise, in phrases which have come down through twenty centuries and will be remembered

‘I am ashamed to say that the British government, by a huge miscalculation, has been an unwitting accomplice to… a policy of such incompetence and arrogance that it is akin to the appeasement of the Nazis.’

‘During the escalation of the conflict, few ‘front line’ photographs appeared (in the media).The extensive omission of maps or drawings, which could have made war operations easier to understand, was particularly striking.Clearly, the aim was to make it difficult for the recipient to trace the actual course of (the) conflict, in order to increase confusion, fear and feelings of anxiety.In this way, the (Croatian) government secured

its monopoly of true information and insight into actual relationships…

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… ‘Belgrade’s counterpart of the ZagrebVjesnik is the daily newspaper Politika, and, in 1991, reporting in this newspaper was subject to a content analysis.Amongst the findings was that subjects were not selected on the basis of their news value, even in the case of war events, but rather on the basis of the political significance of the published reports.The researcher found that such selection criteria served to promote propaganda goals.Instead of portraying reality, reality was interpreted in order to influence the reader more effectively.’

‘…damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world.’

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Preamble, Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 1954 (international legislation)

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‘There is no Bosnian culture.’

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Henry Kissingerurging a Croat/Serb partition of Bosnia on the Charlie Rose Show, September 14, 1995

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‘Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.’

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American satirist Tom Lehrer

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‘There never were any mosques in Zvornik.’

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Branko Grujic, Serbian mayor of Zvornik, after the Moslem population had been expelled and the mosques destroyed.

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‘You can’t mix apples and pears.Apples with apples and pears with pears.’

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Greta Kuna, a Bosnian education minister, explaining in 2007 why Moslim and Croat children are kept ethnically segregated despite going to the same school: The ‘Two Schools Under One Roof’ policy.

And demonstrating how she and other members of the power elite have learnt nothing.In the enclave of Republika Srpska, school history textbooks contain such gems as ‘Orthodox Christianity is the most important religion’ and ‘Muslims are Islamic Serbs while Croats are Serb Catholics.’

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The Serbian parliament refused to condemn the Srebrenica massacre on it’s tenth anniversary in 2005.Meanwhile, a search of the RoyalNetherlandsArmyMuseum website reveals no reference to Srebrenica.The cowardice of the UN and its military commander has been airbrushed from history, even as the children of Bosnia learn to live separate lives under one roof.

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‘A myth arose… that Britain capitulated on recognition of Croatia as a shady quid pro quo for German help over the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty.This is a preposterous notion, and utterly untrue.It was given credence by Genscher’s (German foreign minister until 1992) comment to the effect that ‘We helped you on Maastricht, please listen to us on this one.’This was a personal plea made by him, not the opening sentence of a bargain to which we were committed.We got our way at Maastricht because I refused to sign the treaty unless we did.I did not owe the Germans any favours over Maastricht, and Douglas Hurd did not agree to recognise Croatia on that account.’

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British Prime Minister in 1992 Sir John Major, The Autobiography.Former banker Sir John applied to become a bus conductor on leaving school but was beaten in his quest by another applicant.

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Who to believe?Sir John, a politician, a man surrounded by people out to line their own pockets?Or former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell, who has risked his life many times to find the truth?Whatever the case, time proved yet again that without political will, the high-sounding words of Nuremberg and the human rights treaties were hollow.The idea that everyone, everywhere has inviolate rights is false.

They say the Vietnam War which finished in 1975 was lost on America’s television screens.Beside a smashed bridge, surrounded by freshly wrecked homes, a Bosnian soldier said to me, ‘You photograph this then the Europeans, the Americans will help us.No-one can stand and do nothing as this happens to us.This is Europe.’

But he was wrong.In the world of celebrity culture, a smashed village and a burnt out school count for much less than a pretty princess on a jetski.